Lee.org

Ah, but I’ve said too much already!

I went to Home Depot and got several light bulb splitters. A 75 watt incandescent and an 11 watt Ikea compact fluorescent in each lamp makes for excellent bright lighting. :-)

From their website:

ShortKeys is a utility that allows you to set up replacement text or paragraphs for any given number of user defined keystrokes. ShortKeys monitors the keyboard activity on a global nature and anytime a user defined keystroke combination is typed in, it will be replaced with the replacement text.

It’s a macro program. I type “..address” and it automatically backspaces over what I just typed and inserts my full address. I’ve now got macros for .signatures, and several random things. I like it. It works in any program, Outlook, Mapquest.com, Word, Notepad, Editpad.. anything, because it’s a key-sniffer. And best of all, there’s a freeware version! Get it at Shorkeys.com

I got this email from the DoNotCall.gov people.

Here is the link: https://www.donotcall.gov/Register/RegVer.aspx?DN[trimmed]

Click on the link to complete your request to register your phone number with the last four digits [trimmed] on the National Do Not Call Registry.

Important: You must respond to this email by clicking the link within 72 hours for your registration to be successful.

Once you have registered, your phone number registration will be effective for 5 years. It will be illegal for most telemarketers to call you, and you will be able to file a complaint if a telemarketer does call you. The website www.donotcall.gov provides information about filing a complaint.

Important: After you click on the link, print the web page and keep it for your records.

Troubleshooting: If you don’t get a “Registration Complete” message after clicking on the link, or the link does not work, use your “cut” and “paste” functions to insert the entire link in the email into the “Address” line on your Web browser. Cut and past the entire link – it’s long. Do not re-type it.

*******************************************************************************************************************************
Please do not reply to this message as it is from an unattended mailbox. Any replies to this email will not be responded to or forwarded. This service is used for outgoing emails only and cannot respond to inquiries.

This story is actually from back in September but I’m just getting around to entering it.

I was up at Seneca Lake in September. Will was having trouble getting his van started. He tried putting one of those portable nicad battery chargers on it for a few hours but that didn’t really help. He recharged the nicad pack and tried again the next day to no avail. We tried jumper cables from my car to his van and let it sit for 5 minutes. That worked a little to bring his battery back but still not enough to start the van. Then I had a thought… I had my radio controlled airplane stuff with me so I plugged my airplane battery charger into his cigarette lighter. You see, my charger has a voltmeter on it. I wanted to check the resting voltage of his battery. I saw that his battery was generating 12.88 volts, which should be plenty of juice to start his van.

After checking the voltage, his van cranked right over! It’s Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle at work! Until we measured the voltage, we didn’t know if there was enough… so the van wouldn’t start. But then when we knew how much voltage there was, it -had- to work!

(Yes, this is a completely true story)

I sell stuff on eBay. Many of my buyers pay via Paypal. Paypal has a very convenient integration with eBay and UPS so that I just have to click a “Ship Now” button on their website to pay for the shipment and print out a label. Slick.

I also have a UPS Internet Shipping account. Today I tried shipping the same package with both the Paypal system and UPS internet shipping directly. It turns out that Paypal charges a 15% overhead fee. Paypal charged $9.60 for the package, UPS $8.20. Of course they don’t call it that… Paypal says, “This Shipping Cost is the same as available directly from UPS On Demand”. That’s well and good but no one ever gets a UPS On Demand Account because they are needlessly more expensive than regular Internet Shipping accounts.

I won’t be using that service any more…. paying $1.50 for a series of 6 or so copy and paste operations from Paypal to UPS. Hurumph.

Both my parents drive Jaguars. A ’98 XJS and a ’99 Vanden Plas. I really dislike these cars.

Cons

• The seating is way too low, so that you feel like you are in one of those two inch tall beach chairs.
• The accelerator pedal is situated so that you have to point your toe in order to depress it all the way.
• The radio is very difficult to operate with way too many buttons that do way too little.
• The clock is very difficult to read. It’s too small, the hands don’t have high contrast against the backing in day or night. The hands are mirrored which would be tough enough if the hours weren’t demarcated by mirrored bars.
• The chair is difficult to adjust properly. The controls aren’t intuitive. At it’s best, the seat remains moderately uncomfortable to me.
• There isn’t much headroom.
• Heat is slow to come up.
• Regular maintenance is very expensive. The “regular” 40,000 mile dealer service cost $400 (no expensive parts (timing belt, battery, etc) were replaced!)
• It vapor-locks like a mother fucker. If you start the car, move it 10 feet and shut it off, it sometimes will refuse to start for 24 hours. When this happened to us, the dealer was consulted and told us that this was a common vapor lock problem.
• If you leave the the air conditioner on “automatic” during the summer it starts blowing on full blast too soon after starting. It’ll burn your face with hot air and numb your ears with a noisy full blast fan before letting you settle in.
• With the air conditioning set to “automatic”, it seems that the A/C compressor runs even in the wintertime, drying out the air even more (the lights indicate this but I’m not sure the compressor is actually running)
• The Vanden Plas has folding tray tables (as in “please put your seat and tray tables in their upright position…) in the back seat. That’s kind of cool. Unfortunately, the tray table is a mirror-smooth surface with no edge-lip so that anything placed upon it is bound for the floor in seconds.
• The buttons that control the windows don’t offer enough tactile feedback. You have to look at them to know which window you’re about to open or close.
• You can’t open the window a crack. The power window system interprets you pushing the button for a 1/4 second or less as a command to open the window all the way.
• If you floor the accelerator, the ABS brakes sometimes kick in because it thinks you’re slipping. But you’re not.
• If you try to start the car before it’s “ready” (the seat and mirrors adjust themselves to each driver) the key won’t turn. You have to turn the key all the way back off and wait until it’s good and ready.
• The cruise-control buttons are situated very strangely.
• The center armrest is too high. Only someone who is 6’10” with no head and midget arms could actually lean his elbow on it.
  The door armrest isn’t quite as high but is bad too. The armrests aren’t at a similar height.
• It only has one windshield wiper. It does a fine job of cleaning the center of the windshield but misses the right and left sides. This creates a large blind spot between the 10 and 11 o’clock position in front of the driver during inclement weather.
• The windshield wiper fluid comes out poorly. The stuff is sprayed out from the middle of the wiper, down toward the front of the car. This of course leaves the entire upper half of the windshield untouched by fluid.
• The windshield wipers are a non-standard 17 1/2 inches. The regular $3 replacements come in whole-inch sizes only. Factory authorized, Jaguar-blessed 17 1/2″ replacements cost around $20. Watch out, the books in auto centers claim to have the right size, but don’t.
• The cup holders suck. No really. The front ones are just in front of the driver’s arm-rest which means a cup-laden vehicle prohibits the driver from moving his right elbow past the width of his right shoulder without a spill. The cup holders are too shallow and flimsy. Many cups and mugs have flipped out of this holder during turns and stops. The rear cup holders aren’t flimsy but they’re too shallow and shaped perfectly to hold an ice cream cone with the bottom cut off. This shape doesn’t hold a CUP snugly.
• It’ll set you back $65,000. Monthly lease payments on one of these things costs twice as much as most loan payments. And at the end of the lease, you’ve got nuffum.
• 17 MPG city, 24 highway. Premium gas only.
• People call it “Jag-ee-wahr”. That reminds me of pretentious people that use the word “utilize” when they should be saying “use”.
• No user serviceable parts. Open up the hood and you won’t find an internal combustion engine, you’ll find… something else (I suppose on some toolie/techy/gee-wiz level, this comment should be in the Pro category).
• Not much interior space. It’s 17 feet long and almost 6 feet across, so where is all the interior space? Sure, it’s comfortable, but it isn’t “roomy” by any accounts. The trunk looks huge from the outside but it houses a spare tire and the mother of all car batteries in the false-bottom floor.
• When you start it up, the exhaust reeks of unburned gas.
• You can’t use the car keys to open packages because they are cylindrical and have no sharp edges.
• A few days ago (on 4-2-04), I put it in Park while I was stopped at a traffic light and it refused to go back into Drive until I shut the car off and restarted it, twice.

Pros

• Powerful headlights
• Excellent acceleration
• Quiet interior

If you think the Cons outweigh the Pros, buy one. Just stay away from me.

I spent New Years eve in Philadelphia. Saw fireworks right up close! I was there with PPG and several PP friends. PPG’s Sw has an apartment right on the river (no, literally. If you drilled a hole in his living room, you’d hit a parking level and then water!) The party itself was a bit low key for my taste, but the apartment is lovely. Red curtain, amazing modular wall storage up to 18 feet, rice paper lighting, and a winch-operated table!

I went to Ikea and got a mess of their compact fluorescents. I think I’m finally happy with a compact fluorescent installation! At our front door, I replaced a set of 6 40 watt candelabra bulbs and 3 60 watt normal base bulbs with 3 7 watt candelabra bulbs, 3 40 watt incandescent candelabra bulbs, and 3 11 watt normal base bulbs. In this installation, you can only barely tell the new bulbs are any different and it’s not a bad different. I left 3 incandescents so the fixture would turn on instantly and also because 3 sockets sit so that the slightly larger fluorescent bulbs can be seen from below (bad).

old: 420 watts new: 174 watts savings: 246 watts
at 8hrs/day of usage and $0.10/kilowatt/hr, that’s about $0.20/day.
with a 10,000 lifespan, that’s 1,250 days or $250 savings over 3.4 years

The CF bulbs cost $3 apiece…. $3/10,000 hrs $0.0003/hr
incandescents cost $0.75 apiece…. $0.75/1,000 hrs $0.00075/hr
considering their lifespan, CF bulbs are cheaper to purchase than incandescents

I put them into another fixture as well. 6 40 watt bulbs replaced by 5 7 watt bulbs and 1 40 watt incandescent… 75 instead of 240 watts… 165 watts saved… savings of $0.13/day.

These bulbs don’t work well in many locations. They don’t look good where a single bulb is being used because the light is still a tiny bit pale and “sickly fluorescent”, even though you wouldn’t think that when you see them in Ikea. Maybe it takes several bulbs to cover up their subtle flicker. They don’t work with dimmers (I have to go buy a 3 way non-dimmed switch today). They flicker-on and take a minute to warm up so they aren’t good as the only bulbs where you need instant-on like in a rarely used stairwell. In bare-bulb applications, they don’t look nearly as stylish as incandescents. They are a tiny bit longer than their incandescent counterparts so they might not fit in a fixture; though the Ikea bulbs are a LOT smaller than many other bulbs I’ve seen.

After all my failed experiments, I’m glad that I’m finally happy with a compact fluorescent installation.

I just bought 2 tickets to Burning Man at $175 apiece. Last year I was lucky enough to get a “Low Income” ticket (embarrassing as it is to request such a thing, it really helped a lot to get the break). This year, I paid more and… hmm…. I don’t know who the other ticket is destined for yet (PPG? VC?) but I know that going with someone is a good thing.